Over
the last 132 years or so, Johns Hopkins people have come up with
some pretty bright ideas — saccharine, surgical
gloves, CPR, the supersonic ramjet engine, not to mention
the prototype for the American research university
itself.

So what have they done lately? To answer that question, we
surveyed the university's 10 divisions, scoured a year's
worth of newspapers and announcements, and talked to
friends (and some friends of friends).

Herewith, our list of 20 bright ideas that came out of
Johns Hopkins in 2007.

A new front door

First impressions are important, and until recently the
Homewood campus wasn't making much of one. But with the
October opening of Mason Hall (named in honor of Raymond A.
"Chip" Mason and his wife, Rand) visitors are now getting a
truly fitting welcome. Located at the south end of the new
Alonzo G. and Virginia G. Decker Quadrangle, the
28,000-square-foot Georgian-style brick building is where
visitors can find information about the university's
history, programming, and the undergraduate experience. The
building houses an entry hall and living room, a 125-seat
auditorium, a boardroom for the Alumni Association, meeting
and interview rooms, and the
Undergraduate Admissions
Office. The light-filled library on the first floor, which
feels a lot like the study of a well-traveled scholar,
offers a particularly gracious reception — shelves
lined with faculty and alumni books, university artifacts
like Alfred Blalock's stethoscope, and, of course, some
really comfy chairs.

Handle with care

Where you see a toothbrush, materials and process engineer
Paul Biermann sees a shiv — or at least the potential
for one. Prison inmates have been known to melt the handle
of a toothbrush and insert a razor blade or other sharp
object, turning an instrument of dental hygiene into a
weapon. Biermann, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Applied
Physics Laboratory, has invented a toothbrush made of a
urethane material that's strong and flexible but can't be
melted, making it safer for a prison setting. He's also
developed a razor with a urethane handle, the blade of
which breaks into tiny pieces if removed. "If an inmate or
corrections officer is injured, the state has a
responsibility to see to their health," says Biermann.
"When this sort of stuff happens, it's a cost to the
system. If we can find a way to reduce it, then it helps
save money."

Green machine

Johns Hopkins went "green" in a big way this year —
and not just because the new Decker Quad, which sits atop a
new parking garage, is the largest green roof in the
mid-Atlantic. In March, Flexcar, a car-sharing service,
opened its first Baltimore branch on the Homewood campus.
In July, the university announced a new policy to cut the
campus's greenhouse gas emissions and to become a leader in
developing solutions to climate change. And in September,
JHU Dining and Aramark started emphasizing locally grown
and sustainable foods in campus eateries. But the really
bright idea was to generate more ideas. In November, the
first-ever Green Idea Generator event had Hopkins students
pitching sustainability ideas to faculty and facilities
experts. Three of those ideas were selected to be enacted
during the academic year: converting waste vegetable oil
from dining services into biofuel that can be used to heat
the university; putting a green roof on a portion of the
Mattin Center; and developing a campaign to use more
recycled paper and to recycle more of the paper we use.

Welcome back

When Peter Agre, Med '74, left the School of Medicine for
Duke University in 2005, there was some grumbling that
Hopkins hadn't done enough to keep him in Baltimore. After
all, Agre is credited with the co-discovery of aquaporins,
the channels that enable movement of water in and out of
human cells — and he shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in
chemistry for that work. What's more, Agre has been using
his Nobel spotlight to speak out about the importance of
science education in schools. In October, the Bloomberg
School of Public Health announced that it had lured Agre
back to Hopkins, this time to lead the Johns Hopkins
Malaria Institute (see Wholly
Hopkins, page 29). Smart
move. Agre's innovative research into the molecular biology
of malaria parasites and his ability to lead collaborations
made him the right person for the job, says Bloomberg Dean
Michael Klag.

Sharing a good
book

For a few years now, Dorothy Sheppard, associate dean of
student life, wanted to start a campus-wide book-read to
create a shared experience among undergraduates. In October
2006, when a fraternity's offensive invitation to an
off-campus Halloween party exposed racial tensions on the
Homewood campus, the outcry became a catalyst for bringing
Sheppard's idea to fruition. "Maybe if we had been having
open and honest conversations about race, this might never
have happened," she says. Last summer, the incoming
freshman class and the entire university community were
invited to read Beverly Tatum's "Why Are All the Black Kids
Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" Sheppard says she faced
some skepticism at first. But in September, when more than
600 students, faculty, and staff members met in small
groups to discuss the book, many agreed that it was time
for some frank discussion. Says Sheppard, "This is what the
university was missing."

Apply your
veggies

It was a big year for broccoli — or, more
specifically, for sulforaphane, a chemical present at high
levels in broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and
related vegetables. In August, a team led by Pierre
Coulombe, a professor of
biological chemistry at the School
of Medicine, published a study showing that sulforaphane
helps prevent the severe blistering and skin breakage
caused by epidermolysis bullosa simplex (EBS), a rare and
potentially fatal genetic disease. In October, Paul
Talalay, a professor of
pharmacology who worked with
Coulombe on the EBS study, used a similar idea to treat
something far more common: sun-damaged skin. Talalay's
research used mouse models to test how applying the
chemical topically could counter the damaging effects of
ultraviolet radiation. Sulforaphane is not a sunscreen; it
works after the fact by boosting the production of
protective enzymes that repair UV damage.

Armchair
astronomy

When we wrote about
www.GalaxyZoo.org in September, we
thought it sounded like a good idea. The Web site, which
went live in July, gives amateur astronomers access to
images of the cosmos taken through the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey and enlists volunteers to identify and classify
nearly 1 million galaxies from their home computers.
Apparently, lots of armchair astronomers out there agreed
with us — Galaxy Zoo, coordinated by an international
team of scientists that includes Johns Hopkins
astrophysicist and computer scientist Alexander Szalay, is
a hit. As of December, more than 110,000 registered
volunteers helped to categorize some 30 million images of
galaxies on the site.

An end to binge
learning

Eliminate the four-day weekend? Whose bright idea was
that?
Starting in the fall semester, the Homewood campus
instituted a new policy that put an end to the compressed
Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday or Thursday/Friday class
scheduling for undergraduates — and an end to what
William Conley, dean of enrollment and academic services,
calls "binge learning." The new Monday/Wednesday/Friday and
Tuesday/Thursday schedule means that students won't be able
to stuff all of their classes into two or three days, then
bolt campus or hole themselves up in the library for an
extended weekend. Conley expects the new scheduling will
help build a stronger sense of community on campus. The
bonus: Since the new course schedule resembles that of
other Johns Hopkins schools, students have more flexibility
to take classes at Peabody or the Bloomberg School. "For
us, this is revolutionary," Conley says.

Health care
one-on-ones

In politics, health care is a hot topic this year, but
getting to the heart of such a complicated issue isn't
going to happen in quips and sound bites. So Johns Hopkins
University President (and physician) William R. Brody
offered presidential candidates and others the chance to
talk in detail about how they propose to bring rationality
and order to what he describes as the industrial world's
most inefficient medical system. The conversations,
produced in conjunction with the National Coalition on
Health Care, began airing in January on Retirement Living
TV. According to Brody, political candidates usually talk
about insurance coverage and health care costs without
addressing such critical components of the health care
puzzle as the quality and consistency of care, the
complexity of health care delivery today, and the
management of chronic disease. As of press time, Brody had
taped discussions with former Massachusetts Governor and
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney; Democratic
presidential candidate Mike Gravel; New York City Mayor
Michael Bloomberg, Engr '64; AARP CEO Bill Novelli; and
Erickson Retirement Communities CEO John Erickson.

Teaching the TAs

Teaching assistants are the pedagogical backbone of a large
university like Johns Hopkins. It's their job to help
professors teach. But who teaches the TAs? Until a few
years ago, training was at the discretion of individual
departments. Two years ago, the university's Center for
Educational Resources (CER) made training more formal by
offering Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and Whiting
School of Engineering TAs a fall orientation and workshops
throughout the year. Just this summer, the CER took that a
step further when it developed a TA training manual.
Available in print and online, the manual covers everything
from ethics and university policies, to dealing with
difficult students, to how to write a syllabus. The
first-ever graduate-level one-credit class, Preparation for
University Teaching, started in January. "If students are
going to be taught by a TA, they should be taught by one
who can actually teach them," explains Richard Shingles,
director of the TA Training Institute, who is teaching the
course.

Sending out an
SOS

On April 2, 2001, the Arctic Rose sank into the Bering Sea,
drowning 15 people. It was the worst domestic fishing
accident in a half century, and it occurred despite there
being another boat nearby.
APL mechanical engineer George
Borlase was a naval architect with the U.S. Coast Guard at
the time, and he investigated the accident. Realizing that
boaters needed a way — other than a possibly
unreliable radio — to signal other boats when they
were in distress, he invented the Automated Integrated
Distress Device. AIDD is a waterproof cylindrical device,
about 12 inches high, that is mounted upside down on the
outside of a boat. If the boat sinks to depths of 20 to 30
feet, the AIDD breaks from its mount, turns rightside up,
and floats to the surface, where it triggers a flashing
strobe, sounds a warning, then fires off flares. "My
altruistic dream is that every boat would have one," says
Borlase. "It's simple, and it makes so much sense. Why
wouldn't you have one?"

The new word in vaccines:
"Aah"

Not painful like an injection, not messy like a liquid, and
tough enough to stand up to the blazing African heat
— the next big idea in vaccines is as simple as one
of those breath strips that dissolve in your mouth.
Biomedical engineering
undergraduates from the Whiting
School, working with faculty adviser Hai-Quan Mao and
Aridis Pharmaceuticals co-founder Vu Truong, SPH '95, Med
'99 (PhD), figured out a new way that someday could
inoculate infants and children against rotavirus, a
diarrheal illness that each year kills about 600,000
children worldwide. They created an oral quick-dissolve
strip that melts when placed on the tongue. The drug's
coating is designed to pass through the stomach but
dissolve inside the lower intestine. And unlike the liquid
vaccine, the strips don't need refrigeration.

An encyclopedic approach to
best evidence

What reading programs have been proved to help middle and
high school students? Which comprehensive school reforms
have positive effects on elementary school achievement? And
does computer-assisted instruction help kids learn math?
The answers are all there in the Best Evidence
Encyclopedia, a new Web site for educators. It was
developed by the School of
Education's Center for Research
and Reform in Education. The site, one of the first of its
kind, disseminates reviews of research on educational
programs and practices. It is designed to give teachers and
researchers unbiased information about the strength of the
evidence supporting a variety of programs available for
students in grades K–12, says Robert Slavin, A&S '75 (PhD),
director of the center and a professor of education. "We
want to make it easy for educators to identify what works
and what hasn't been shown to work so they can make wise
choices for their kids," he says. "There's no tradition in
education of asking for evidence. [Educators] make
decisions based on marketing, ideology, or politics. A
large part of what we're trying to do is help change
that."

Two from one

Last year marked the beginning of two new academic
divisions at Johns Hopkins — the School of Education
and the Carey Business
School. Their predecessor, the
School of Professional Studies in Business and Education,
had served working professionals well for many years. But
by becoming two separate schools, both will now be able to
focus on their talents, strengthen their programming, and
increase their reputations in their respective fields. A
$50 million gift in 2006 from William Polk Carey, trustee
emeritus and chairman of the New York real estate
investment firm W. P. Carey & Co. LLC, made possible the
founding of the new business school.

Mouse model for
schizophrenia

When studying schizophrenia in animal models, scientists
until now have relied on drugs to mimic symptoms like
delusions, mood changes, and paranoia. This year, two
separate teams at Johns Hopkins developed some of the first
genetically engineered mouse models of the disease. Akira
Sawa, a School of Medicine associate professor of psychiatry and
neuroscience, led a team that created a
mouse that develops some of the physical and psychological
characteristics of schizophrenia; a team led by Mikhail
Pletnikov and Christopher Ross of Medicine's Department of
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences developed a mouse model
in which a mutated gene (DISC-1) can be turned on to
trigger the disease. Because this is an alteration in the
gene itself rather than a drug-induced state, researchers
can more accurately study the subtle changes in behavior
that occur as the disease progresses.

Cooking up a
nanocurry

Curcumin, the pigment that gives the curry spice turmeric
its brilliant yellow color, is known to have positive
effects in killing certain types of cancer and clearing the
plaques in the brain caused by Alzheimer's disease. But
effective treatments based on curcumin have been limited
due to its poor dissolving properties. Anirban Maitra, a
Johns Hopkins associate professor of pathology and
oncology, came up with a solution to the problem of
curcumin's insolubility. Working with Hopkins colleagues
and a team at the University of Delhi, Maitra encapsulated
free curcumin with a polymeric nanoparticle and created
nanocurcumin. Nicknamed a "nanocurry" for its blend of
nanotechnology and ancient spice, nanocurcumin can pass
easily from the gut to the bloodstream. Once in the blood,
the polymers degrade and the curcumin leaks out. Lab
experiments with pancreatic cancer cells have shown that
nanocurcumin is effective in destroying tumors, and early
animal studies have found that the particles are
nontoxic.

Teaching old drugs new
tricks

It can cost more than $1 billion and take more than 15
years to bring one new drug to market. Even then, the FDA
only approves 20–30 new compounds a year. "At this rate, it
would take more than 300 years for the number of drugs in
the world to double," says Curtis Chong, a
pharmacology and
molecular sciences MD/PhD candidate in the School of
Medicine. But what if existing, approved drugs could be
used in new ways? Chong worked with David Sullivan in the
Bloomberg School, John Liu in the Department of
Pharmacology, and others to establish the Johns Hopkins
Clinical Compound Screening Initiative. With 2,400
medications, it is the largest publicly accessible
collection of FDA-approved drugs available for screening.
Currently, the drugs are being screened by collaborators at
Hopkins and elsewhere on diseases including malaria,
cancer, and HIV. Chong and Sullivan want to see the library
expand to include the approximately 10,000 drugs known to
medicine.

Easy access

For health care professionals in developing countries who
need access to online information, it's all about the
bandwidth — or the lack thereof. Patricia A. Abbott,
assistant professor of nursing informatics in the School of
Nursing and director of the Global Alliance for Nursing and
Midwifery Community of Practice (GANM CoP), adapted a World
Health Organization communication system for low-bandwidth
settings to help midwives and nurses in the field. Say, for
example, a midwife in Tanzania with a dial-up connection
and an Internet kiosk needs detailed information about
managing the third stage of labor. No problem. She sends an
e-mail request to GANM CoP, which responds with an e-mail
that contains a link to the requested information resource.
The resource — an article, a slide set, a photograph
— is stored at GANM and is much smaller than a Web
site, so it requires much less bandwidth to download.
Furthermore, it opens in the recipient computer's RAM
memory, so it doesn't hog the kiosk's memory. The resource
stays on the GANM site, so the midwife can access it when
necessary. Some 1,536 nurses, midwives, community health
practitioners, and others have joined the service. "We've
gotten this overwhelming response from people all over the
globe," says Abbott. "We're just putting people in touch,
sharing best practices, and trying to reduce isolation.
That's the simple beauty of this."

Up to the
challenge

The problem: Though diabetes is one of the most common
chronic diseases in China, few people there seek treatment.
The solution: networking. A team of students from Johns
Hopkins' Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies,
led by second-year graduate student Christopher Meyer, won
first place and $20,000 in last year's Thunderbird School
of Global Management Sustainable Innovation Summit with its
business model targeting retirees who exercise in China's
public parks. The students' idea was to identify one of the
retirees to become a trained "friend" and work with the
other exercisers, helping them to monitor and treat the
disease. Meyer, whose team was one of only two out of the
10 in the final round not from a business school (the other
non-MBA team was also from SAIS), says that the secret to
his team's success was to use the idea of social capital.
"We looked more at the grassroots level and saw the people
who were not getting services, while the MBA teams looked
at people who already had access."

Outreach through
opera

When Peabody
Conservatory composer Christopher Theofanidis'
new opera, The Refuge, made its debut in November, The
New
York Times called it not just a musical event but a
"dramatic outreach to the more than 1 million foreign-born
residents" of Houston. The 90-minute piece, performed by
the Houston Grand Opera, featured seven tableaux in which
the company's regular soloists were joined by non-Western
musicians and immigrants who told their stories of how they
came to the United States from Africa, Vietnam, Mexico,
Pakistan, India, the former Soviet Union, and Central
America. "My challenge was to provide a coherent musical
voice through the whole work that would represent the kind
of unity of the city, while at the same time create the
wonderful flavors of many of the cultures' beautiful
musical traditions," says Theofanidis, whose father was
born in a village on the island of Samos, Greece. "It was
one of the most challenging and rewarding things you can
imagine."